¡Nosotras también somos técnicas!

A few months ago Google organized Iberian GoogleCloud Platform Tour 2014 and I was lucky enough to manage a place there. I had not played too much with Google Cloud previously but I was considering some of their tools potentially useful for my work at Platform161 and, who knows, maybe also for some of those dozens of pet projects that are always around my mind.

So the first step was of course creating an account there and filling some billing information. They provided us with a code that would allow us to spend some money with the Google Cloud tools without needing to pay. I decided to keep that code for the moment I had more time to use their tools with some real project, and I think that it was worth it as at the end of the day I had spent 0,01 $.

Sadly, I’m still looking for the free time that will allow me to work on those personal projects (as a lot of people, I would need days with 48 hours to be able to do half of the things that I want!), so I was really surprised when I received a new email from Google:

So Google is in my computer, in my mobile phone and now it is also in my head and it knows me better than myself! They have discovered that all of us we are always thinking on the money that we will get from something, who cares open source or community things! We shouldn’t as we are not getting revenues from that!

But that’s not all what Google said in the email:

That’s why Google Cloud doesn’t want me, they are not interested on me continue using their tools unless I expect to get some money with my projects, and I don’t think that they will serve for anything else than practicing, testing new technologies and maybe, helping someone else.

I think that the last paragraph of the email has the answer of this change in their mind:

Everything looks to be around the VAT. If I’m not doing business, I shouldn’t take care of handling any VAT, but Google doesn’t want to worry about my taxes, so this was the “nicest” solution they found. These are business, and with a personal use, you are not going to make them win more money!

We are Platform 161 and we are one-of-a-kind. Each member of our specialized team works tirelessly on our single source digital platform that serves all avenues of digital media trading. Our cloud based technology is not only fully customizable, it’s user friendly and seamlessly integrates into the advertisers’ own marketing process. Our main aim is to make things easier for our clients to thrive in a fast moving digital landscape. What we offer is the best custom advertising technology in the business and at Platform 161, we settle for nothing less! Are you in for a new challenge? We are looking to strengthen our team with a Ruby on Rails software engineer, and we are curious to meet you.

Your playground

You will join a highly motivated team with years of experience who have been at the company since the start. The team works cross border making use of multiple online communication tools. You will play a key role in working with multiple stakeholders in different countries, developers, product and project management.

We’ve adopted agile methodologies to constantly add value, improve quality and reliability. The prioritization of the roadmap is discussed with a Scrum/Kanban approach. Afterwards, you will start working proactively on the user stories using QA-tools like peer review, continuous integration and automated testing. Besides that we organize quarterly hackathons for the whole team on one location. Part of your daily work will be to come up with suggestions to continuously improve product quality and customer satisfaction, both from a technical as well as from a functional perspective.Leer más…

¡Compártelo!

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Today it is the 5th anniversary of the Manifesto for Software Craftmanship and Doug Bradbury encouraged us to give our opinion regarding the status of professionalism in the last years. I would like to share in this, my first post in English, my experience about how I feel that it has changed.

Do you think that the bar of professionalism has been raised in the 5 years since the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto was published? Why or why not?

I started working in my first job more than 7 years ago and there I found some people that cared about their job and felt frustrated because of not being able to do it better. We knew that the things were not right, but often we lacked a guidance that could help us to realize what and how could we start fixing the things.

Some time later we knew the Agile community and the pieces started to fit for me. I found myself surrounded by a lot of people that really cared what they did and wanted to learn everyday how to do it better. I started hearing about Software Craftsmanship and I was really motivated after finding more people that didn’t thought that this work was only about doing 8 hours or just typing.

Since then, I always try to do the best of my job. I try to solve problems, not just to implement features, I try to be always responsible of my job and overall, I try to create things that I would like to sign as any craftsman would do with his work.

I consider myself really lucky because I found very good masters on my way and currently I have a lot of local communities around where people is willing to share what they know. That’s why now I’m also trying to add my two cents starting with some small talks, encouraging people to go to community events, creating new groups and hopefully, from now on, sharing some more things again in this forgotten blog.

In summary, I cannot categorically state that the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto has raised the bar of professionalism in the profession, but I can state that it helped me to find more people with the same concerns that I have, that it showed me how much I still need to learn until I can have work that I would sign proudly and it motivated me to look for good masters and be a master for the ones that are in an earlier stage of the path.